Thank you for sharing that. I think something that really resonates for me in your work and in your writing is, for me, a reminder to think about change and to think about the kind of reimagining that so many of us want of how we are together, you know, how we organize, how we live together and so on, is to not only approach it in a intellectual way, right? And there's something so refreshing and nourishing about the way you talk about that, that it's a bit much more holistic. It's about embodiment. It's about feeling and sort of starting with self also. I know you you write and talk a lot about fractals that we are fractals and you know, how I am and how I am with this other person is a fractal and and it all scales up. So it seems fitting that that's your answer today. It's

true. I mean, that has has, I feel like I finally fully landed that and I'm like, oh, I really have a fractal understanding of the world. And when I approach things from that, I can handle what's happening in the world. I can find a place to be inside of all of it. When I'm not thinking in a fractal way, I get so overwhelmed that I find myself still to the point of stagnation, you know, that I'm just like, there's nothing I can do about this. The problems are so big and we have to resolve them. We all have to get on the same page and we have to do this. And that's not how human history generally works, right? Is we as a species very rarely get on a same page and move together, especially not in the right direction. So we tend to group think in the wrong direction to group think towards oppression and towards fascism. So if we want to move in the right direction, there's this other thing and I'm writing about it now more like really deepening my study of my cilia and really trying to deepen my study of like, what does it actually mean to move underground and what does it actually mean to move relationally? What does it mean to let the impact of your life be the impact of what you can touch and who you know and how vast the impact could be if everyone took that on in a more significant way? I think there's so much energy that we lose because we are directing it towards a general public, you know, commentary or a general like commenting and fighting amongst strangers on the internet and they were doing this sort of generalized work rather than turning to the relationships in our own lives and the people that we can talk to and touch and reach and elect and being in the conversation there of just like now, you know, I think it's one of the ways we're conflict avoided at the collective scale, right? Is that it's like, I'll do it over here but if it comes to having an in-person conversation or an interpersonal moment where I'm like, your politics caused harm to me or the boundary you just crossed or the practice you have with regards to the earth or, you know, I was just around a friend who doesn't use plastics and is really, really, really mindful about it and it was so inspiring to me because I'm like, yeah, I think of myself as that kind of person but as I'm moving through the world, sometimes I'm tracking it very rigorously and sometimes it falls away, you know, so we like arrived somewhere together and they offered us plastic water bottles and my friend was like, no thank you, I have a reusable water bottle, where can I refill it? Like, we actually don't want any of this in this space and, you know, it looks like where we're sourcing our toilet paper from because there's plastics in it, there's, and it was just so helpful to be like, if every community had someone in it who was like, this is what I think about and someone else is like, I think about the water use, you know, for me I think a lot about the water and electricity use in a space, you know, like why are all the lights on? Why does everything have to be so bright? How, you know, are we really being mindful about the resources that come in? Are we accumulating a lot of food waste and stuff like that? So many of the things that we actually need for our planet are rooted in how many of us can be a little uncomfortable at a fractal level in order to create room for something new inside of what we currently think is inevitable and lasting forever.

Mmm, yeah, I really love that. It's like that tolerance for discomfort, I think also, I think we're generally conflict-avoidant and I think we're also discomfort-avoidant. Oh yeah, you

don't like it. I mean, especially, it's hard in a capitalist system that's like, you don't have to be uncomfortable, you never have to be uncomfortable. Like, you can buy something for that, you never have to be uncomfortable. And it's like, I think it's true that you can really live a life where you experience very little discomfort and that life will probably have very little positive impact. So you can sort of go along down the middle of the path and not bump into anything and not impact anyone. And I don't know how satisfying that kind of life is. I'm not familiar with how that feels. Like, I feel for me from a very early age in my life, I have surrounded myself with bumps, bumper people, you know, people who are like, hold on, I'm going to intervene or I'm going to interrupt this moment for the sake of what I think will lead us to justice or I think will lead us to things being more equitable, where I think will lead us to lives that are more joyful. And that piece really resonates the most to me. I think that people don't understand in my life, when I'm really uncomfortable and I express it and I act from that place, it actually almost always leads to a massive improvement in my life. It leads to me stopping participation in my own oppression and in my own repression. It usually leads to, you know, making a relationship more authentic. I recently had a moment with someone who I deeply, deeply love, where whenever we were talking, I was being interrupted a lot and I'm an interruptor. So I'm like, it's all fair out here, but it was at times when I was trying to share things that were really big and important for me. And I was like, oh, I could just not say anything because I don't want to hurt someone's feelings or I could say something because my feelings are being hurt. Right. And by speaking up, I know that this person loves me and would never intentionally want to be shutting me down or pushing me away. It was worth the risk of the discomfort. Now our relationship is much deeper and there's a recommitment to how can we really make intentional time to hear each other out? You know, there's stuff like that means fine tuning and micro, micro interventions on the self. But it's really growing that like, you know, I tell people, I'm like, you don't have to start with the biggest thing. You don't have to start with the most uncomfortable thing. You can start with things that are just like, this isn't quite right for me. And how things are for me actually does matter because I'm a fractal of this whole thing functioning, you know, whether it's my community system or my family system, my organizational system. I also think there's this discomfort, the of tension. And I've had a friend recently really helping me with this about being able to be in a righteous tension, right, where she's like, you know, my default is to be like, I'm in tension with someone. How can I make it as comfortable for everyone as possible for us to be in some slight disagreement, but it's okay, right? I'm really like trying to contort and double around and do all this stuff. And she was like, when you feel like the only option is to internalize the tension, then that is actually not a sustainable relationship. Because what you're having to do to yourself is so damaging. So let the tension be between you and other people and see what happens. And, you know, it's intensely uncomfortable. You know, I think that we we have structured our society. So we let some people hold the tension for the whole. And I'm starting to understand the link between that and privilege, the link between that and comfort, right? But I'm like, oh, there's a certain degree to which being privileged really means I just don't want to have to be uncomfortable. I don't have to deal with the things that make me feel tension. And I'll overlook it or I'll try and make it move away from me. For me, I'm like, Oh, how can I lean in and see that there's actually a dignity and tension? You know, and I wrote about this in a murder strategy that's like, in a birthing process, the tension heightens to the max when the big change is about to happen, right? The ring of fire that moment in a birth where you're like, I'm not doing this, I'm getting off the bat, I'm going home, I cannot do this. My body was not actually designed for this. Everyone was really, really wrong. I don't want to do anymore. As a doula, I witnessed that moment with so many birthgiving people. And it's like, babe, we're already past the point of of no return. And we are already past the point of getting to make a decision about this. This is actually happening now. The same thing is true in our relationships. The same thing is true in our structures and our government, right? It's like we're past the point, I think with gun violence, for instance, we're past the point of something is changing and has to change around this, right? We're already at the breaking point. Things are already tear torn apart. We have to figure out a way through it now. And if we can acknowledge that, the tension is usually the sign that's like, we're in the chamber, we're on our way. So there's a different set of actions that are needed. And if you can handle the tension, you can actually tell what are the right actions that are needed. If you take off the table, I can stop change from happening. It's like, that's not even on the table. That's delusions. Change is inevitable. It's definitely happening. It's always happening. And so, for me, that always gives me hope. When I'm overwhelmed by the conditions as they are, I'm like, well, they are going to change. And I am going to be a part of shaping that change, right? And so, yeah, let me get a little bit more comfortable with being uncomfortable so that I can be a good agent of those changes.

Yeah. I've never thought about it. That's a really great articulation that that tension right before a big change, right before a shift, that's been my experience too. But if I'm realizing how kind of stingy it is, ironically, that I keep tensions to myself, because I think that that's the better thing to do, that it's, maybe it's just me that's thinking this, maybe I'm just being difficult.

But it's so valuable. Right? I mean, it's like the same thing. Other people who might not be birthing bodies, now, how do I feel that? I feel like people know it from a storm. A storm builds up and you can really feel some of us feel in our bones, storm tension building and when it breaks, what it does for the world, for the sky, everything, the way it's just like, okay, now we're in the storm. Hmm. I've

got this mind map of things just out of shot here and I'm kind of looking at all these juicy words jumping out at me that I want to talk to you about. But one thing I want to talk to you about is science fiction because I know that's something that- I think

you're a topic? Yeah.

It's something I love and I loved this quote that I found from you about who is something like that all organizing is science fiction. Can you unpack that for us? Like, what do you mean by that?

Yeah. So when you're taking on the work of organizing, what I mean by organizing is people who are looking at the world and saying, how can I help mobilize the people in my community to affect a change? And ideally, it's a change that is going to improve their own lives and improve the well-being of their community. So organizers are, to me, a very special breed, a very special gift that humans have developed within our capacity to be. But it can get kind of tedious. It can feel very difficult. It can feel very much like I'm knocking on the door having the same conversation over and over again or I'm going up for this policy change over and over again. And I'm like in the 500th page of trying to understand why and how these billionaire people are getting away with these legal loopholes. It can be very difficult. So we can forget sometimes that we are also the super heroic figures of the action stories of the future. So Harriet Tubman was a science fictional character of her time that she had visions. And she was like, I can see that my people are free at that time. That was a science fictional thought. It's just like, it's both rooted in a reality. We are equal. We are free. That is true. But it's also rooted in what at that point seemed like a fiction. We've been in multiple generations of enslavement as black people. What are you talking about? And to be visionary in that way, that is continuously the work of organizers. So in this moment, organizers take on shaping the future, a future in which we can be in right relationship with our planet, a future in which we have abolished the president and putative systems of literally continuing to enslave people and continuing to hold people as if that's going to stop us from harming each other when the things that cause us to harm each other are these vast inequalities. We see a future which everyone has access to home and education. And seeing all of that is science fictional behavior. You're seeing something that is like, it's actually rooted in our scientific reality that this is all possible. We live in an abundant world. We live in a world where we are structured towards interdependence. We live in a world where we actually have enough to eat and enough space and enough of everything we need, scientifically to base ourselves in an abundant future. But right now it feels fictional. It feels like we have to imagine and dream it and write it out. So I loved this reframe for myself of being like, can we look at the organizers of the world as people who are already engaged in future in that way? And if we start to see ourselves as people who are taking responsibility for the future, I think it can bring a little bit more thrill and excitement and purpose into the everyday work that we're doing.

Yeah.